Khagodis, New Interworld Court: A Guided Tour
Hasso woke to the realization, to the resignation that there were people in his world who hated him and wanted him dead.
“You needn’t worry about the spy-eye, I disabled that for good,” the Lyhhrt said.
“I was sure you would,” Hasso said, with a degree of cynicism that he had also become resigned to by now. He grasped his staff and pulled himself from the basin, let it drain and showered down in fresh water so the sea-salt would not crust on his scales.
The Lyhhrt, who had spent the night in his workshell, propped in a corner, said, “I hope you will not mind if I use your basin to change my water and feed myself?”
“Of course you must use it, and I will wait here until you are done—”
“Truly—”
“I promised myself to look out for you, Lyhhrt, and I will do that as well as I can.”
He kept his eyes and mind away from the Lyhhrt’s self-care, though this Lyhhrt was the least private of his species, and for a few moments watched the sunlight moving slowly above the great Mesa with its pride and burden, and throwing reflected sparks on the walls from the Lyhhrt’s moving diamonds. “There is to be a guided tour through that ship at half-past third-quarter,” he said. He could not have told the Lyhhrt anything he did not know already, but the alternative was not to speak at all. Gorodek and Ekket cannot help but be there. “I do not care to take part in that, but—”
:I will stay here and keep watch over myself, Archivist. You cannot guard me with your fierce mind forever.:
The Lyhhrt also knew that Hasso could not bear to be so close to, so far from Ekket, without end. He said very carefully :It is a pity that the young woman cannot take courage and break away from that brute.:
Hasso, staring into that distance, said, “She is only obeying the law of her country, that keeps tight control of their children until they are married … many countries do—and, you see, it is our endless worry over fertility.”
“Archivist, I think you know too much about the Law.”
The fencing and gates to the designated land around the Mesa did not quite bar the long ragged tail of foreign correspondents attached to the delegations, but let in one designated journalist, drawn by lot, at each showing. A moving walkway led from the gate around the mesa to the elevators that were not visible from the pearly towers of the Court. Around the ship was a railing tall enough to keep Khagodi from falling into the canyons and electrified at the top to keep vandals from climbing up.
The commentary was of course recited by a Professional Speaker, not merely a guide, and without the usual air of forced enthusiasm. The whole prospect was so vast that awe was unavoidable, and any exaggeration would have lessened that power:
Twelve years ago …
But Hasso knew all that, any quick dip into his well of facts would have fished it out. It had been recorded ten thousand times: the stark cavern lined with the dusty windows of cells holding specimens of extinct animals preserved by a mysterious process that kept them looking alive, and they had been reanimated in computer and plastene models so very many times that every child had worn out three sets of them in the last five years.
And we do not know even how it traveled here, because there is no great engine in it, and no travelers, but only these casings with their interrupted lives … .
The line was one long shuffle-shuffle on dulled steel floors, with a deal of tail-jittering. Hasso had hoped Ekket and her surly Governor would not have come along on this tour so far into the Conference, but they had, seven or eight siguu ahead of him—and perhaps they had come to all of the tours so that Gorodek could parade his pandered bride-tobe … Hasso wandered out of the opening, nodding at the guard.
“Seen too much of it already, citizen?” the guard asked in a tone less rude than the words. “So have I.”
“You are paid for it,” Hasso answered with a smile he knew was wan. He walked away along the flagstoned area, unwilling to have even one companion, following the circle of safety-railings that keep people in, thinking of the closeshut cell he had nearly died in. The rising cliffs and deeps of the pinkish-gray canyons were more amazing than those petrified remains, he was thinking … he wished his eyesight was keener so that he might if only in imagination browse among them—
—and felt a very curious sensation, not sudden, not painful, a feeling of becoming gradually, almost satisfyingly … transparent … his spirit as the essence of a clear window through which some Looker was watching. The vestigial scales of a prehistoric crest rose on his head and tingled down his back. I am being looked into … . Not by any invasive telepath. No, being used as a magnifying glass.
As soon as he formulated this thought the feeling stopped. And somewhere, and in some time a voice was saying:
no truly it is the people who
Hasso shuddered and stumbled, saved himself from falling by grabbing at the railing, the breath hissed in his gills, he could not have said a word to save his life.
There was a moment of absolute blankness and then a riot broke out.
An old woman Hasso did not know came running out of the doorway, jaws working soundlessly, holding in one hand a helmet that glinted and flashed with jewels, and with the other pulling at Ekket’s arm, neither of the two trying to speak at all, with their thoughts blazing, it seemed to Hasso, out to the horizons.
:You must put it on! You must!:—the woman kept pushing the helmet at her—
:I will not! I will not!: Ekket grabbed at the helmet and with surprising strength sent it high over the rail, glinting and clanking down into the vast abyss below. Pulled the gold from her neck and sent it following the helmet.
“Eki! What are you doing!”
Ekket found voice: “I will not marry that terrible man! I will die first!”
“The disgrace! The Governor! Your poor mother!”
“She made a dreadful ruin of her life—I swear that by all the Saints she will not ruin mine!—and as for your Governor, that ugly, horrible—”
By now there were a score of others rushing out, Gorodek’s guards and courtiers, the accredited journalists, ambassadors from three worlds, and eventually Gorodek, helmeted but obviously sizzling with fury—“Someone will pay for this!”—then catching sight of Hasso and squawking, “It was him! It was his fault!”
Hasso gaped at him.
Two security guards in red sashes pushed their way through this throng, not gently, and plucked Ekket from the grasp of her chaperone. One of them took a light helmet from a pouch—“Please let me put this on, dems’l, it is only for a few moments—all others of you please stand back and let us have the elevator to ourselves—and you, Governor and your entourage, you may come down in good time—”
Hasso, who was bracing himself against the railings and could not make himself move, tried to sort out all of these thoughts and actions in his mind. What came of them was: first, Gorodek had suddenly announced that he would marry Ekket on the spot, the priest he had with him to bless all his endeavors would perform the ceremony; and then Ekket had begun an outcry of—what?—rape? She had rushed outside, he had seen all of that, and half of the people inside the ship had become hysterical.
And whatever had been happening to him while he stared out over … ?
The old chaperone, who was wearing Gorodek’s livery, caught sight of Hasso and cried out hysterically, “What are you gaping at, you fool!”
“A spectacle,” Hasso retorted, and walked away quickly before he made one of himself.
Ekket
Yes it was true it was all true he did he said he would teach me to obey him if I would not love him and he would not need to pay my mother anything for me that he had me in his grip now like some stupid torturer in an Old Saint’s Tale that we learned in school where the Saint let anything be done to her and bore it without complaining and got great honor after she died horribly he grasped me and had two of his filthy guards hold me because I could tear him in three p
ieces if I only got my hands free and I could not move and faugh! I puked all over his damned marble floor and I thought he would kill me and worse worse he showed me this great vulgar helmet even a whore would not wear and said when we were married he would lock me into it forever and I was afraid he would kill me then and he made me go to the ship with him without even letting me augh! without even letting me clean myself and all this is true I swear by all those stupid Saints you have me here my mind is yours
Chief Security Officer Tharma switched off the resonancer and said, gently for her, “Yes, dems’l, but esp is not evidence. DNA is.”
Hasso and Tharma: Covering Everything
Tharma was looking at him kindly; kind looks were her specialty, as humility was Hasso’s. “Do you understand, Hasso?” Some intensity along with the kindness.
Hasso found tears in his eyes, and a little of Ekket’s nausea. “I don’t understand why I needed to learn all that.”
“I was considering justice and the law,” Tharma said. “I want your legal opinions before all the lawyers go to work.”
Hasso would have been amused at her admission of need, if he was in a better mood. Tharma was a woman of infinite patience, but no shame or timidity.
“I know you will keep quiet about this, Hasso, and I will do the same for what you are about to tell me. I believe Ekket was telling the truth, and that tests will establish it soon. I need to know more about foreign law: Will Gorodek give us trouble? Will the young woman? Can we charge him with anything? Or help her? I dealt with international matters for the WorldCourt when it was in Burning Mountain but those cases were mainly battery, theft and fraud. I have heard of alien peoples whose males are so much larger than females that rape is only too common, but here the idea is ridiculous—my husband was half my weight! and I have heard of only three such cases in my whole life.”
Hasso said with a bitter smile, “I’m afraid that Gorodek was behaving the way he would be expected to do in Western Sealand. I know little about their ancient Scrolls and I am not an anthropologist, because these actions refer to customs, not laws. Some who lived there have told me that the bridegroom is often expected to take the bride immediately before marriage, in a sense to put his signet on her, to claim lineage if she has been fertilized. And she is supposed to resist to show that she is pure. But.” He paused to put words more exactly. “He must make a ceremonial announcement of betrothal as soon as she accepts him, and there’s no evidence that the ‘bride’ has ever agreed. And those guardsmen constraining her while he forced her—but they will all claim diplomatic immunity!”
Tharma sniffed and gulped air. “And she’s from Center Point, one of those little Isthmus territories. He could be held on it, I know that much. However, I don’t want to punish him, I want him to shut up and get away from here.”
“Even if he were willing, you will need him for a witness in the murder of his aide, that pitiable Sketh.”
“I have no pity for him. It is that child … it is just as well she burst out like that, because it showed how much she was being forced, and that chaperone’s trying to control her by laying hands on her was a mistake … and she will have to be tested for pregnancy, and even if she is not pregnant her people may believe she is infertile and that will do her no good either—ek! this is a most difficult situation.”
Hasso said slowly, “She may be a child in her country, and even in his, but if it’s provable that she was wronged, WorldCourt law will give her adult status for the sake of redress. That will free her from both Gorodek and her mother. But both of them will be furious over Ekket, and—”
“That’s what I am here for, Hasso, to make sure there is no ‘and’.” Tharma dipped her full-jawed head for emphasis. “But Hasso, there is another, and I think deeper, matter. Are you recovered from that strange experience up on the Mesa? Other people feel something else strange happened there.”
Hasso was uneasy about discussing what he felt had been an out-of-mind experience; and was just about to feel relieved that she had not seized upon him as a witness. But because he was a truthteller he said haltingly, “I went along on the tour because I felt it was expected of me … I was quite bored and left the ship to look through those railings out across the canyons, thinking that it would be vastly more interesting to explore them … and had—it was not sudden but gradual—a sense that some, that someone or something was looking … at me, not at but through me at, I guess, at the world, and saying, no really it is people who—” He stopped, feeling as if his head was full of clouds, and shook it. “What it meant was, I suppose—and what is !t!—that people are more, eki! important and interesting, and that is true enough, though I did not quite feel it at that moment, and then Ekket came rushing out in terrible distress with that woman clutching at her—and all others seem to have gone into hysterics!” He was trembling. “For a while I could not move and thought I was going mad.”
“Others felt so of themselves,” Tharma said dryly. “If not mad, then certainly disoriented. Eh, many religious and scientific authorities have thought long and hard about that ship and its possible connection with the origin of our species. Since we have never been found to relate to any other animal here, all our religions have expected to find that burning gods had carried us here in huge eggs, or else that we simply had not dug deep enough for fossils. If that ship brought us here it seems that both were half true … .
“Lately there has been a push to bring some Ungrukh people to look at the ship because they actually did begin as animals plucked off another world, by a powerful energy being called a Qumedon who somehow twisted them into a form of humanity—you understand where I am leading?”
“In short,” Hasso said bluntly, “have I been contacted by a Qumedon?”
“Have all of the persons on that ship? Could that have caused Ekket’s outburst, and their panic? I need to know that we didn’t neglect any action that would have avoided it.”
“Whatever I sensed may have stirred that panic … I don’t know. I can’t be sure that my feelings were caused by anything but normal fugues of the brain, but from what I have heard of Qumedni—they are like the Ix in that nobody wants to know much about them—they are cruel and capricious as well as being powerful shape-shifters, and I am as certain as an ignorant man can be that nothing I felt could have come from a Qumedon.”
“Thank you, Hasso.”
Rising from his squat he said, “Tharma, did anyone else hear this, voice?”
Almost reluctantly Tharma said, “No.”
“I thought not.”
Hasso was left feeling very uncomfortable: if his not-quitevision had been evidence of a Qumedon, or the same as made no difference, it might, through him, have caused a disturbance that made Ekket pull herself free of Gorodek, causing a scandal in both countries, and leading to Saints knew what retribution on Gorodek’s part.
Gorodek had pointed a finger and accused him—of what? Doing a deal of thinking about the Quadzulls manufactured on Five Point Island, probably! He had already been falsely accused by Sketh of trying to seduce Ekket and been cleared. If Gorodek had really believed this he would have considered Ekket impure and rebuffed her. Truly, he had gotten himself into trouble without help from anyone, least of all Hasso. And Ekket’s hearts had been knocking together in fury for a long while. Perhaps this was why Gorodek burned to put his mark on her before she could break away.
Hasso wished he had not gone on that disastrous tour when he ought to have been with Reddow discussing the supposed Lyhhrt threat to Khagodis, surely still the most important matter in the world—
If only Gorodek had married that woman in Center Point, who would have been a real match for him in nastiness, and left her daughter alone!
… And Center Point was an Isthmuses state, wasn’t it? Not far from that gold-bearing shore where everything began, and those iridium fields … ten times a fool, that Gorodek.
But Hasso, you are no better. You have only made an even greater enemy of Gorod
ek, and that old man’s fury will become even more savage.
And I am more adrift, and farther away than ever.
Fthel IV, the Garden State of Bonzador
The State of Bonzador was a vast expanse of tropical brush down in the Southern Continent due west of the Serpentine River. Its southeast corner was called Garden Vale, though it produced no fruits or flowers and its differences from the rest of the country were in trees more gnarled and twisted, and weeds and insects more poisonous. Its first colonists had dreamed of resorts and casinos, but their plans had withered until the colonies became stunted into isolated villages drowning in thorny branches.
Ned Gattes knew this district too well. He had come one time looking for shelter and found a hell.
“This place is no nearer to Khagodis, Ned,” Spartakos said at first look, “we have been here before and were hardly able to get out whole.”
Ned grunted; he also felt the Lyhhrt’s grinding impatience. They had arrived in a rusty aircar smelling of whatever it had transported earlier, that had gone rancid. The barracks were camouflaged tents with inflatable mattresses, the paper fatigues (“You’ll get cloth when we board,”) were the same kind Ned had been given during his year in the reserve at school, the packaged food was edible, the insecticides worked half the time, and the experience so far was much like the training and fighting routines he’d gone through in gameplexes on five worlds.
The area was thick bush brought down by defoliating agents to a scrubby and slightly rolling terrain that might have seemed dry but for its thickly moist air, and the verges of still-encroaching thornbush that had to be cleared daily. Rains came down almost every day before sunset, just as they did on equatorial Khagodis, and when the sun shone it did so through mist. No ancient civilization had ever gained a foothold in this country.
Mindworlds Page 11
